Kindle Edition
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Category:
Fantasy
Publisher: KDP
ISBN-10: 1370032854
Type: Fiction
Pages: 23
Copyright: March 13, 2017
ISBN-13: 9781370032853
Price: $0.99 (eBook)
A surreal journey through the depths of a madman’s mind, as a mysterious female visitor torments him with strange tales.
A surreal journey through the depths of a madman’s mind, as a mysterious female visitor torments him with strange tales about ... a crafty shoeshine boy with a unique way of drumming up business, a fast-talking professor who hates marching bands, a pirate who digs up an astonishing treasure chest and then throws away the priceless contents, a young lady who enters a forbidden room in a gloomy mansion and discovers an incredibly detailed dollhouse with a deadly secret, and Cleopatra, whose passionate poetry inflames Marc Antony, with disastrous consequences.
Excerpt
Lord Aldrod awoke with a start and sat bolt upright, a strangled cry dying in his parched throat. He reached for his tin tankard and took a sip of the tepid water. Or was it his chamber pot? He always got the two of them mixed up. Whatever the source, the liquid tasted like drowned men. He got up from the floor, rubbing his sweat-dampened forehead, trying to thaw out his numbed thoughts.
The infernal wench had infected his mind, planting seeds in his psyche that had sprouted into another stupid story. She’d be back again tomorrow, to fertilize the furrows in his brain and reap her harrowing harvest. She’d open her book and plunk her rump into the chair they’d brought for her – which was sitting there even now, laughing at him as only an empty chair can – and she’d read from her poisonous pages, opening the spigot of her mouth to pump forth more bilge to nourish her satanic seedlings.
He eyed the small window in the back wall. The sun had abandoned the sky, taking its light with it, and now the moon draped its black blanket across the heavens. The white specks were lint. Astronomers called them “stars,” distant balls of superheated gas – with a few planets thrown in here and there to keep everyone guessing. But what did astronomers know? Had they ever flown into the void? How could they be so certain there was no lint in the firmament?
He walked over to the window, grasped the rusty iron bars and gazed up at the night, fervently wishing he had a blanket of his own.
A movement below caught his eye and he glanced down at the courtyard far below.
“Aaah!”
The woman was standing there in a vague patch of moonlight betwixt leafy shadows spawned by gnarled trees. Her face was turned upward, her gaze locked on his, her eyes brimming with cold, infernal light like little malevolent moons.
A fitful breeze stirred the tree branches, shifting shadows, and she vanished.
Lord Aldrod spun around and let out a sob as his back thudded heavily against the wall. He slid slowly to the floor, the gritty stones scraping his back as tears streamed down his cheeks. The woman was evil incarnate. She hadn’t been lurking betwixt the shadows, she was a shadow herself, a dark shade from the underworld sent to torment him. He must wash her and her seedlings out of his brain, flooding his mind with his own thoughts till he drowned her out.
But what was there to think about? Art? Politics? Science? Philosophy? They bored him.
Memories? Ah yes, he had a ton of those, and they were anything but boring.
A serving maid stabbed in the scullery, a dowager drowned in a duck pond, a yachtsman’s skull bashed in by a broken bollard, a stable boy strangled by a stirrup strap.
Wait a minute. Were those truly his memories? Had he actually done such terrible things?
Damn Tattali Moanthistle! He’d tried so hard to forget, but she’d tricked him into dredging it all up again. He wanted to expurgate, not regurgitate. If only he could take all the horrors inside his head – Tattali’s tainted tales and his own rancid recollections – and turn them into scrolls and tie them up with ribbons and dump them in a box and shove it onto a shelf inside a burning library, reducing his remembrances to crumbling crisps.
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